Monday, August 18, 2003

Orson Scott Card seems to have a problem with Jews. His latest screed in the Rhinoceros Times starts out as just another OCS rant about the “intellectuals” who poison our culture. The problem this week is that Neil Simon wouldn’t let a local theater company in Utah excise the F-word from its production of his play, Rumors. Card makes the highly-debatable supposition that Neil Simon is an “intellectual,” or at least a darling of “intellectuals” – a shadowy and sinister group that the sci-fi scribe makes no attempt to define – and then moves on to a sweeping indictment of New Yorkers in general, Manhattan apparently being the epicenter of snooty, foul-mouthed eggheads who tear themselves away from their brie and Marxist criticism only to laugh at the honest yeomanry living west of the Hudson.  So far, par for the Card course. But then comes a telling moment. Quoth Card:   “Let’s just suppose, for instance, that the new Greatest Comic Playwright brought a play to New York in which several characters routinely used a four-letter epithet for “Jew” that begins with the letter “K.” Let’s suppose that the characters in the play used the “K” word in exactly the places where the “F” word is used today. (“Give me that k–ing gun!” “Go k– yourself.” “Go get k–ed.” “K– off.”)” Now, let’s leave aside the fact that Card is apparently unable to distinguish between a vulgar word and a racist epithet – that he regards the offense to propriety caused by an F-bomb to be as grievous as the damage caused by a word like “kike” or, presumably, “nigger,” which words can serve not only as slurs but as tools of oppression and even incitements to violence. What’s really interesting is how Card shows his hand – by choosing “kike,” a word that’s lapsed into semi-obscurity, he’s telegraphing his idea of just who all those New York intellectuals really are: Jews. That’s who’s wrecking the culture of the good people of Utah and Greensboro. Card would no doubt point to his muscular advocacy of Israel (another regular feature of his Rhino writings) as proof that he’s not an anti-Semite, and I don’t suppose that he really is one in his own mind. But just as Ender’s Game features heroic, alien-fighting, Jewish commanders as abstract characters, but presents the only Jew we actually meet as a stereotyped buffoon, the author seems to have some real-life discontinuity in his attitudes as well. 9:01:19 AM    comment []

I thought my wife was nuts when she first suggested that we relive her childhood by going to the Jersey Shore, since NC has some of the finest beaches around. But as usual she knew what she was doing. We travel each summer to a time-warped town with no chain stores, no Mickey Ds, a place where the most happening nightlife takes place at the Iceberg ice cream shop. The water was cold at the beginning of the week and less so by the end. We swam and biked and caught crabs and ate them. We went to Seaside with various cousins and aunts and in-laws and rode the rides and ate cheese steaks and fries and pizza.  The unofficial motto of the Jersey Shore: cash only. My laptop croaked and I drove from our beach rental to New York and got a new one from the nice folks at ZD tech support and had lunch with my boss and was safely back at the Shore by the time the lights went out in the city. We had power the whole time. Lesson learned: the back-up function for Radio only backs up your blog to your hard drive – you have to upstream it to have a copy on the community server. A nasty drive home through rain and traffic, then a day of rest, and now it’s back to school. Read: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, and Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. Elijah read Ender, too, which allowed us to sit on the beach and discuss the details of the game with the giant and the bugger war. 8:10:44 AM    comment []